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Hillary Clinton for President

There’s a very interesting distinction between the democratic and republican parties in the year 2016.

For the GOP, there are at least three unique factions that are loosely held together mainly by their common fear or disdain for liberal ideology. The business wing mainly supports globalization and low business taxes, with minimal government interference. The religious faction wants to impose some degree of theocracy despite the first amendment prohibition against it. They’re mainly against abortion and civil rights. They don’t really care about what the business wing cares about and vice versa. And the Tea Party thinks that government is incapable of, well, anything and that all funding for it should be cut off completely.

Those three factions are pulling the party apart as the relative disdain amongst each towards the other two, is starting to boil over. Long gone are the adherents to Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow republicans. Instead, the PUMA’s are on the prowl (Party Unity, My Ass).

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is no longer the entity about which WC Fields once famously said “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a democrat!”

That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be disagreement among democrats with regard to the best way to go on matters of policy. But on the bigger pictures, there’s far more unity on the left than on the right.

Which brings me to my personal leanings. I like both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and would have no problem voting for either of them as our 45th president. If you go to isidewith.com, you can take a quiz to see which candidates are most in-line with your views, and both Clinton and Sanders place above 90% for me personally.

There are issues where I disagree with each of them. Clinton would do relatively little about the influence of big money in politics save to nominate judges who could pare back or overturn the Citizens United decision. Sanders appears to be a shill for “big organic” when GMO’s are almost definitely a less expensive, more productive means of feeding the planet as global warming and overpopulation will stretch its resources too thin.

If they agree on most other issues of policy, I’m inclined to give some weight to the organic vs GMO issue and tip the scales towards Clinton when the primaries reach my home state of Pennsylvania in about a month.

But even with that, there’s a real reason why I’m officially saying that I will vote for Hillary.

For months I’ve been receiving emails from Bernie Sanders’s campaign. I honestly don’t know how he got my email address. I certainly didn’t offer it to him or his campaign. In the past week or so, he’s stepped up the mailing; I honestly don’t know when the last time was, that I received fewer than two such emails in one day. And I’m tired of them.